


Bonus Round One

by arenoseAnima



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Character Death, Ghosts, Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 16:21:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arenoseAnima/pseuds/arenoseAnima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My fills for the first bonus round of the Homestuck Shipping Olympics, during which participants may prompt a ship and a pair of genres to be filled by whatever unfortunate shipper is struck by the inspiration bat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Terezi<3Vriska, ghost story/coming of age

Vriska hears the ghosts before she sees them. They seep through the cracks between the stones that build her hive like an ocean has been upended on top of her, and it takes them so long that she starts to think she’s losing it, hearing whispers that demand to know why she killed their owners. She kills lots of people! But she always makes sure that she’s mind-riding them right up until the moment of death so she can make sure they won’t become poltergeists.

Or at least that’s what she thought she was doing. It turns out that maybe all she was getting out of that was dying screams that wrote themselves on her brain and pushed whatever had been good in her further down underneath a heavy load of fucked-up lusus responsibility, because when the ghosts twist raglike into her vision she recognizes every one of their faces. At first she sits on the floor in a little fort made of broken eight balls, thinking maybe they’ll get bored of tormenting her and leave, but they keep spiraling around her, trying to suck her down in their whirlpool. She flings eight-ball fragments at them, but of course they just go through and shatter into even tinier shards on her walls. She tries to force her way into their minds and make them go away, but it’s like keeping her grip on a tub full of surprise noodles; they writhe away and mock her for the effort. She leaves, running from her hive across the bluffs in the cool night, but the ghosts follow her, and they’re not impeded by the rocks that catch her feet or the dead branches that lash her arms.

Nothing will make the ghosts go away, and she’ll be damned eightfold if she lets it upset her, she thinks, as the tears roll down her face. She plugs her ears with spongy corks of spider silk to keep out the whispers; it helps, for a little while, long enough for her to log on to Trollian and get a hold of Terezi.

AG: Ha ha, very funny, Pyrope! Can we quit the game now and get 8ack to... the other game?   
GC: 1 DONT KNOW WH4T YOUR3 T4LK1NG 4BOUT   
AG: 8ullshit!!!!!!! I 8et you sicced one of your little low8lood 8uddies on me to get me 8ack for crippling Tavros!   
GC: 4CTU4LLY   
GC: NO >:\   
GC: 1S TH3R3 SOM3ON3 BOTH3R1NG YOU?   
AG: Quit pl8ying coy.   
GC: YOUR3 TH3 ON3 WHO 1S R3FUS1NG TO T3LL M3 4NYTH1NG YOU KNOW   
GC: SCOURG3 S1ST3RS ST1CK TOG3TH3R BUT ONLY 1F 1 H4V3 4NY 1D34 WH4T 1S GO1NG ON >:[   
GC: 1S H3 CR1PPL3D FOR GOOD? DO YOU KNOW TH4T FOR SUR3?   
GC: VR1SK4, YOU KNOW 1   
GC: W3LL   
GC: YOU KNOW, BUT 1F YOU K33P TURN1NG ON P3OPL3 W3 4R3 4CTU4LLY FR13NDS W1TH 1 W1LL NOT B3 4BL3 TO 4B1D3 BY YOUR M1SCONDUCT!   
GC: VR1SK4?   
GC: VR1SK4 4R3 YOU TH3R3

Vriska drags her wrists over her eyes and catches her choking, shuddering breaths. Terezi is lying through her stupid pointy teeth, she knows it. Nothing happens to her that Terezi doesn’t know about, and vice versa! They are sisters to the end, and lately Vriska has been trying to get up the gall to ask her - oh, it doesn’t fucking matter what she wants to ask her, because she is a dirty stinking liar and nobody wants redrom with liars.

Fuck.

She wipes her eyes again and puts her hands back to the keyboard.

AG: Yes, I’m here, you dum8 asshole!   
AG: I was g8ing something to drink! Some of us actually have lives outside the gru8top and need to do things like eat!!!!!!!!   
AG: Anyway you are a stupid f8cking liar and I h8 you so much I could sp8. Pl8tonic8lly!!!!!!!!   
AG: You know 8xactly wh8 is going on 8nd you just w8n’t TELL ME 8ecause it’s p8rt of one of your 8ullshit games!   
GC: WOW   
GC: SO 4S SOON 4S SOM3TH1NG GO3S WRONG B3C4US3 YOU 4R3 4 H1GHLY 1ND1SCR1M1N4T3 MURD3R3SS YOU BL4M3 M3?   
GC: SOM3 S1ST3R YOU TURN3D OUT TO B3!   
GC: 3V3N 1F 1 D1D KNOW WH4T W4S GO1NG ON   
GC: 1 WOULDNT T3LL YOU   
GC: >:[ 

Vriska puts her fist through the monitor. It hurts, and she spends a good fifteen minutes picking shards of glass out of her hand while the ghosts laugh at her. Shame burns up and down her spine, sinking into her hands and feet and making them feel almost too heavy to move. Why is she embarrassed about these ghosts laughing at her, anyway? They’re dead and she’s alive! She’s already won, and they’re just jealous that she came out on top in the end! But as she watches, a few of them drift together and begin to talk in low tones that don’t reach her ears; she recognizes them as clouder-player teams. They’re happy dead, and here she is bleeding all that live blood out the wound her sister made stabbing her in the fucking back.

Well.

She’ll show them. There’s still half of Team Charge left, and whoever’s sending these ghosts at her needs a good lesson on how to do revenge properly. She hopes they’re watching. And if they aren’t, putting Megido down will be good to get rid of some of her pent-up anger! 

Vriska flicks some blood off her hand and massages her knuckles, then puts her fingertips to her temple. She sends out a tendril of thought, and - oh yeah, there he is. That yellowblooded moron Captor. She can make an example of him, too. She wraps the fist of her mind around his pathetic little half a brain, and she never, ever, ever looks back.

Not even once.


	2. Aradia<3<Vriska, existentialism/slapstick

_The scene opens on Vriska Serket and Aradia Megido sitting on opposite sides of a blank and unadorned room. They are both reading a book whose title is obscured by masking tape, Vriska aloud and Aradia silently. Vriska’s reading is accompanied by bombastic gestures that threaten to upset the book’s position on her knees. Aradia looks as though she is about to strangle her companion._

VRISKA: “The blood is compulsory!” Wow, who wrote this? This is total garbage! You always pick the worst books for our reading dates!

_Vriska throws the book at Aradia, who manages to duck as it impacts the wall behind her. She catches it as it falls and lays it on her lap, and unbeknownst to her, her own copy slides to the floor._

ARADIA: Reading a play is pointless if you give up not even halfway through. Oh, look, now I’ve lost my place. If I pick the worst books, you certainly don’t make them better by being such a tiresome reading partner.

VRISKA: Maybe you would be having a better time if we were reading “Quatermass vs. Ungoliant” like I wanted!

ARADIA: You spoiled the ending for that one. I wasn’t interested.

VRISKA: I didn’t spoil anything! It’s obvious that the big badass spider is going to beat the stupid weak adventurer guy. Or whatever he even is!

ARADIA: A scientist. Some of us prefer our heroes to be a little more intellectual!

_Vriska tries to throw the book again, but of course it is already gone. She looks at her empty hand in confusion, then glares at Aradia. Aradia rolls her eyes and looks back at the book in her lap._

ARADIA: Wait, this isn’t where I left off.

VRISKA: Maybe you are just too stupid to realize where you marked your place! Or maybe this book is so boring that all the pages are the same!

ARADIA: Shut up.

_Aradia flips back through the book._

ARADIA: “I’ve frequently not been on boats” - wait. This isn’t...

_Aradia turns the book this way and that with an expression of consummate confusion. Vriska watches, snickering into her hand._

VRISKA: Wow, you sure are dumb. Can you even read?

ARADIA: I’m not the one who throws books!

VRISKA: Yeah, you’re the one who throws dates!

ARADIA: Ugh!

_Aradia drops one book on top of the other and knee-shuffles across the featureless room to Vriska. She raises a hand to her, but Vriska grabs her wrists and holds them apart, laughing._

VRISKA: Wow, you can’t even slap me properly. You can’t do anything right! You are a really rubbish kismesis.

_Vriska gives Aradia a kiss. Aradia bites her on the mouth, and she leans back with a shriek._

VRISKA: Oh my god, I hate you!

ARADIA: I know.

VRISKA: Shut up!

ARADIA: You are easily the most obnoxious woman I’ve ever had the displeasure to know!

VRISKA: I know.

ARADIA: Shut up.

VRISKA: Are we going to keep reading that dumb book, or are we just going to sit here so I can tell you how stupid you are?

ARADIA: If you would let go of me, I could get the books and we could continue.

VRISKA: I threw that crap for a reason! Looking at your ugly face is much better than having to stink up my brain with all those dumb words.

ARADIA: So you’re just going to hold my wrists for the rest of time.

VRISKA: Sure, why not.

_Aradia gives Vriska a kiss. Vriska bites her on the mouth, but this does not deter her, and for an indeterminate amount of time they trade kisses and bites until Aradia is sitting in Vriska’s lap._

ARADIA: I hate you.

VRISKA: I know. Hey, how about we forget about reading and go back to my hive?

ARADIA: Why bother?

VRISKA: What if somebody shows up?

ARADIA: You’re right. Shall we go?

VRISKA: Yeah, let’s go.

_They do not move._


	3. Sollux<3Nepeta, alien invasion/tragicomedy

“There’s a big thing in the sky,” Nepeta says. She’s curled on the windowsill, her tail twitching without rhythm; there were birds sitting on the roof beneath Sollux’s, but they vacated the hot, still summer air when the ship arrived. It hangs in the air in exactly the way that bricks don’t, impossibly, ridiculously portentous.

“Great,” Sollux says to his computer screen. “Awesome. Perfect. You get back to me on that one.” He cracks his knuckles in an effort to regain his concentration - after all, his DPS is carrying the whole fucking raid and they can’t afford to be any shittier than they already are. He pushes his glasses back up his nose and turns up the Ventrollo volume.

Nepeta slides off the windowsill and creeps over to the high-backed chair that Sollux insists on calling his command thenter. He’s as oblivious as ever, at least until she rolls underneath the desk and starts pawing at his feet. She dodges a reflexive kick, then hoists herself into his lap; he shrieks like an overheated teakettle and bats at her face with his noodly hands until finally he realizes he’s beaten and just glowers at her over his glasses, adopting the preferred sulk modus of crossing his arms over his chest and slouching backwards. She puts her hands on his chest and stares at him, her pupils dilating. “There’s a _big. Thing_. _Outside_. Don’t you even want to _look_?”

“Hold _on_ ,” he hisses, and reaches around her to push to talk so he can mutter a sullen “afk” into his headset. Rather than getting up, he wreathes the chair in flickering red-blue psionic energy and shuttles it and its cargo around the maze of wires littering the floor and all the way over to the window. Nepeta squeaks with laughter the whole trip, and Sollux manages half of a smirk, showing a few fangs.

That is, he _would_ take them all the way to the window. There’s a terrible ghastly silence, a terrible ghastly noise, and once more a terrible ghastly silence; the outer wall of Sollux’s respiteblock simply ends now in a glass-smooth slice. The sizzle of ozone polluting the air makes Nepeta’s nose tingle and twitch.

“Oh my god,” she says. “I _told_ you.” She leaps out of Sollux’s lap; he grabs for her tail too late, and she almost goes over the edge in her eager investigation of the damage. She runs a claw along the sheared edge of the floor, then winces and puts the cut fingertip in her mouth. “It’s still hot. Also, sharp.”

“No shit.” Sollux stands and joins her at the edge, looking over; underneath, he can see some poor bastard that must have been standing at his window, because now the stump of his torso is leaning over the edge and dangling about a mile of intestine down to the ground. He stares down at Nepeta next to him and crouches to put an arm around her. When he hugs her to his skinny side, she looks at him with a question written on her face, but he just shrugs, and she nestles to his chest again. “So are we gonna die, or what? We should probably leave,” he says into her hair.

“What about your raid?”

Sollux’s blood pusher lurches like a runaway shopping cart. He struggles to keep from smiling as he tells her “I think this qualifies as an official RL emergency. BRB, murderous asshole aliens invading.”

“Then let’s _go_!” Nepeta almost trips him as she rushes past, her hand clutching his in a grip that turns his fingers a gross fishy-pale grey. He wheezes for breath as he tries to keep up with her, and if not for his psionics he’d have a dozen bloody noses on the way down the stairs. They reach the street, and there’s the stink of ozone again, so strong that he almost forgets that it feels like his arm has been wrenched out of its socket.

There’s fire everywhere. Most of the buildings on his block are in flames, or missing big parts, or both, and the broken bodies of trolls flung from their homes litter the street. The ship still hangs under the roof of the sky as though it’ll come down any moment, and it flings down tree-thick columns of energy like an angry god poking insects with a pencil. As they watch, it begins to disgorge smaller ships that rocket towards the city on blue torches. Sollux’s hand tightens in Nepeta’s.

“I don’t know about you,” she growls, bristling, “but I’m not going to let these jerks just wreck everything. Like this is even our first alien invasion! They don’t know what they’re getting into!”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Sollux lies. He had been scoping out the nearby manholes for hiding spots, but, well, if Nepeta is going to go off and get herself killed somebody has to keep her company. He takes off his glasses and wipes a dusty smudge off on his shirt. “Looks like they’re in for...”

“Don’t.”

Sollux slides his glasses back on. “Double trouble.”

“Why am I dating you again?”


	4. Sollux<3Nepeta, supernatural romance/tragedy

She died protecting him from culling drones. The most loyal assistant he had ever had, and a combatant better than anyone he had ever met - he would be dead twice over if it wasn’t for her. And she had been felled by one lucky shot. The cryogenics facilities they had been working on together needed to be completed quicker than he had ever anticipated, but a few drops of mind honey in his coffee took care of that. From there, it was a simple matter of learning how to raise the dead.

It went slowly at first, of course; breakthroughs always do. He had the expertise of Drs. Harley, Vantas, and Lalonde (Sr.) to draw on, but he outstripped even the knowledge of the brightest minds in the field of reanimation within a month. They simply didn’t have the drive he did, or the vast stores of mind honey, either - when Nepeta was helping him, he didn’t need its jolts of energy, and his stockpiles bloated; now, he needed a dose to even get up in the evening. He needed all the help he could get. It’d be all right again once she was alive. It had to be.

He ran the tests of his first serum on culled grubs. When they awoke screaming and died in moments, leaking blood from every orifice, he tried again with a tweaked serum, and again, and again, until he had run out of the grubs that were supplied him from his grant. He began to visit the breeding caverns so he could barter with the jadebloods that guarded them, receiving more corpses in return for whatever scraps of his research were useful to them. Soon even those weren’t enough. He slipped by the guardians and ambushed fresh crops of grubs during their trials; no one was the wiser, and he eliminated the additional variable of _accidental_ death. He saw no downside.

Sleeping in his recuperacoon, so far away from the freezer where she languished, became harder and harder each day. He began instead to curl outside the heavy metal door that separated them, and he eased the nightmares he was plagued with by taking small doses of sopor slime. Of course he had heard of the dangers of ingesting the slime, but surely small amounts wouldn’t hurt. And anyway, he needed it. He needed all the help he could get.

His breakthroughs came faster with her closeness; sometimes the grubs would survive for hours at a time, squirming around the lab table and nibbling on his fingers, even happily eating the pellets of food he gave them. He liked the greenbloods especially; the sounds they made when he rubbed their abdomens soothed him as well as it soothed their passage back into death.

His research hit a plateau nearly a sweep in. Every night he made no breakthrough, he needed more sopor slime to sleep, and the more sopor slime he took to sleep the more mind honey he needed in the morning. His hands were beginning to shake, his head to ache, his thoughts to wander so far he couldn’t bring them back. Sometimes he would sit a whole evening unable to make any sense of the notes he had taken the night before. He had to do _something_ before he deteriorated even further without her.

His serum wouldn’t get any better as long as he was slipping, and the longer he went the less effective it was. He couldn’t afford failure. He couldn’t _take_ failure. So, one night when his head was clear enough to think, he took her body from the freezer and laid her on the table.

She was as beautiful as he remembered - even more so in death, her lips the green of fresh-sprouted grass. The chest wound that killed her had been sewn up by the expert hand of Dr. Harley; he barely noticed it was there until his fingers brushed the stitches. He bent and kissed her cold forehead, remembering how she would do the same for him when he was in one of his moods. Her hand was limp in his, but he knew deep inside that soon he would feel it tighten again, full of strength and vitality and love.

 He flicked the hypodermic, sending bubbles to the top of the sickly-green solution within. He squeezed the plunger; a single bead of fluid glistened on the needle, and he wiped it on his coat. He put the needle to her vein and looked at her still face one last time; when he slipped it in and pressed the plunger, he waited for the first breath of her new life to come.

It didn’t.

She lay there as still and as silent as the grave, and as cold as loneliness.


End file.
